![]() ![]() Eleanora dropped out of school in the fifth grade, but had discovered the music of Louis Armstrong, or Pops, as she called him, when she heard it played on a Victrola in a neighborhood brothel. ![]() She was twice committed to a Catholic reformatory, the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, once for truancy and again at age 11 after she had been raped by a neighbor. Since Sadie often worked as a maid to white women travelers to earn a living, Eleanora was shunted among relatives and friends. Her mother told her that the talented guitarist and banjo player Clarence Holiday was her father. The source of much of the mythology of her life, Holiday’s “autobiography” Lady Sings the Blues (1954), was ghost-written by New York Post writer William Dufty and is unreliable in many details, and the film of the same name (starring Diana Ross as Billie, 1972) is even less accurate.īorn in Philadelphia to the 19-year-old single domestic worker Sarah (Sadie) Harris (later Fagan and Gough), Elinore Harris (Eleonora Fagan) endured a difficult childhood in Baltimore. As a performer, she could make you fall in love, she could break your heart.… There was no other person on the face of this earth who was like her. All she wanted was to have fun in whatever way it struck her. She didn’t apologize for it and she didn’t feel ashamed. If you had something stronger, she’d use that. If you had a stick of pot, she’d take a cab ride on her break and smoke it. If she was handed a drink, she’d drink it. If a man she liked came up, she’d go with him if a woman, the same thing. ![]() Nightclub owner Barney Josephson characterized her unique personality:īillie Holiday … did what she liked. From her earliest days as a singer she gave as good as she got, loved to live it up and enjoyed the life of a Harlem nightclub performer, complete with marijuana, alcohol, and sex (with both men and women). Frank Sinatra listed Holiday as his most important influence.Īlmost as famous for her life-story as for her music, Billie became a legend in her own time for her role as the “tragic” victim of male abuse, racism, drugs and alcohol, and she appropriated this role for the narrative ballads she chose in the later years of her career, such as “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.” Her earlier repertoire had also included livelier songs and blues rhythms, but even early on she emphasized the slow torch song, the lament of a woman unlucky in love, such as “Lover Man.” The popular legend of the self-destructive artist, however, represented only a partial aspect of Holiday’s reality. Inspired as a child by recordings of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, she eventually sang with virtually all the greats of the Swing era: Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Art Tatum, Teddy Williams and Benny Goodman among many others. Although she lacked any formal musical training she had an uncanny ability to “hear” rhythms, syncopations and cadences and developed her own unique improvisational style, influencing the development of jazz and pop music for decades to come with the mesmerizing emotional intensity of her singing. Billie Holiday overcame an impoverished and abusive childhood to become the definitive jazz singer of the 1930’s and 40’s. ![]()
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